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Since the game’s release in 2016, VR gamers have been asking for VR support for No Man’s Sky, the sandbox space survival game from Hello Games. The most recent hint the developers might be considering it comes from a recently posted poll to the community of players, asking what they wanted to see in future updates to the game. Among the 10 possible options is ‘VR Support’.

No Man’s Sky was first teased in late 2013 and became one of the most anticipated titles in gaming history due to Hello Games’ ambitious claims about its scope and depth of features. By the time it released, a particular criticism was that while Hello Games had claimed it would be multiplayer, players could only see named planets from other players. They could not actually directly interact. Over the past two years, however, the game has received multiple major updates addressing the missing features from launch as well as performance and stability issues, and much of its playerbase now seems satisfied with the state of the game today. In many ways, it now feels like a completely different game and similar to the originally teased concept.

The demand for VR support for No Man’s Sky is not arbitrary. Earlier this year, we wrote about reasons why the game would be perfect for VR. VR is extremely well suited to games where the player is primarily in a cockpit, though only a portion of No Man’s Sky is set inside a spacecraft. Elite Dangerous, another sandbox space game with planetary landing, is considered by some to be one of the best VR games available, and many players have bought a VR headset to enhance their experience in it.

Of course, this is only a poll, so the community may vote to prioritize other features, or potentially not enough will vote for VR support for it to ever be added to the game, but the fact that Hello Games intentionally put it into the list means there is a decent chance of it coming eventually. It is also not known whether this would be limited to PC VR headsets, or whether it would also come to PSVR (given that the game is already on PlayStation 4). Regardless, we’ll keep you updated as soon as any further VR news from Hello Games emerges.

An official Twin Peaks VR experience premiered at the Festival of Disruption in Los Angeles.

Presented by Collider Games, the demo was less than 10 minutes long in an HTC Vive headset with hand controllers. Twin Peaks VR uses teleport locomotion so it is perfectly comfortable for first-time VR folks, which likely includes some long-time Twin Peaks fans reading this post. For those unfamiliar, Twin Peaks first aired in 1990 from the mind of David Lynch to change the face of television with shocking revelations and iconic locales like the “Red Room.” The series ended after two years on a Lynch-directed high note, but those wishing to dive deeper into Lynch’s surreal universe filled with waking nightmares and doppelgangers were only partially satisfied by a prequel film, Fire Walk With Me (1992).

More than 25 years later Showtime brought Twin Peaks back with Lynch directing 18 mind-bending episodes which aired last year. Many cast members came back to their roles for Twin Peaks: The Return including original stars Kyle MacLachlan and Sheryl Lee. Over the weekend Twin Peaks VR offered some fans their first chance to visit two locations from Twin Peaks — Glastonbury Grove and the Red Room. The project was shown as part of Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, a two day art, film and music event to benefit Lynch’s foundation promoting transcendental meditation. Photos provided courtesy of the The David Lynch Foundation show Kimmy Robertson, who plays Lucy, checking out the experience.

Kimmy Robertson (Lucy from Twin Peaks) tries an HTC Vive at the Festival of Disruption. Photos above courtesy of the David Lynch Foundation.

The experience started with a flashlight out in the forest in search of Glastonbury Grove, a place which serves as a kind of portal to the “Red Room” — a place I was both afraid and excited to visit. Because the experience uses teleportation for movement it should be comfortable for most users. Some early VR headset buyers find the teleportation movement style breaks their sense of immersion and prefer to have the option to move freely around the environment using sticks or touchpads, like in a traditional video game. More on this near the end of the article.

I could see the owls watching me from the trees and Glastonbury Grove was just a few teleports away. I quickly found my way into the Red Room looking into the murky puddle on the ground. From there I saw a number of iconic items including a ring, coffee, white horse and the “evolution of the arm” — with familiar sound and lighting effects that were also alarming, like a section where the room and curtains seemed to darken so I couldn’t see into the corners anymore. I tried to escape through the virtual curtains but I was almost too afraid to reach forward and move them aside. Indeed, the very last segment of the official Twin Peaks VR preview artificially shook my view for a few seconds — like I was getting ripped from that world.

It’s like Tamagotchi, but in a galaxy far, far away. Magic Leap made their fair share of announcements during their inaugural L.E.A.P. developer conference last week, showcasing an impressive collection of upcoming, as well as already-released experiences and updates. From mixed reality board games, to realistic A.I., every corner of the Magic Box event space

Jaunt is letting go “a significant portion” of its staff and “winding down a number of VR products and content services in the coming weeks.”

The prepared explanation comes in a Medium blog post and an additional statement sent over email:

“Today we had to make some difficult decisions in an effort to realign Jaunt for continued success. We are restructuring the company, resulting in letting go of a significant portion of our staff. After these changes the company will be focussed exclusively on Augmented Reality and our XR Capture technology, which provides a clear path forward. It was a difficult day at Jaunt as we are losing some of the most amazing talent in the industry, each of whom have individually made groundbreaking contributions to the company and the industry as a whole.”

Jaunt was early in offering multi-platform apps for 360-degree content and the company also built camera systems to capture videos in that format raising over $100 million, according to Crunchbase, from investors including The Walt Disney Company, Evolution Media Partners, CMC, Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, SMG, Axel Springer, ProSiebenSat.1 SE, The Madison Square Garden Company, Google Ventures, Peter Gotcher, and Sky.

“When you’re very early in a new video technology platform, it’s sometimes important to do lots of things. You got to cover a lot of bases. What that’s afforded Jaunt is kind of an early lead creating an end-to-end solution for video VR, for cinematic VR,” said then-new CEO George Kliavkoff in an interview with UploadVR.com 2016.

Kliavkoff was succeeded as CEO of Jaunt by Mitzi Reaugh, previously VP of Global Business Development and Strategy, on Oct. 1.

“Jaunt will continue to build innovative software utilizing our strong engineering team in San Mateo and our new Chicago-based engineering colleagues who joined us as part of our recent acquisition of the Personify Teleporter technology,” today’s blog post reads.

Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.

We’re in a bit of a lull now for news after Google’s big Made by Google event and Magic Leap’s first ever Leap Con developer conference. XRDC is coming up at the end of this month with a scattering of a few other events before the year closes out and we look forward to CES 2019.

So, now’s as good a time as any to start reflecting a bit more. Since consumer-grade VR has been out for about two and a half years at this point, we’ve seen tons and tons of VR games. We even put together a list of 100 must-play VR titles that, as extensive as it is, actually was tough to make — we had to cut some off. That’s how many good VR games there are.

But that also means there are lots and lots of VR games that don’t get the recognition they deserve. Whether it be a small indie game you keep coming back to that flew under the radar or an otherwise flawed game that you adore despite its issues, you probably have some personal favorites that you consider underrated.

What do you think is the most underrated VR game? Or, which VR games do you think are the most underrated? Do you have any personal favorites you try to recommend to people any chance you get?

Real-time cooperative building and AR functionality arrive in a seasonal themed update to EA’s mobile Sims experience. The Sims FreePlay, a free-to-play mobile version of EA’s wildly popular strategic life simulator, The Sims, launched its latest update today, offering a slew of fall/autumn themed content to spice up your digital backyard. This includes new plant

Low framerate in VR is not just a visual annoyance, but can also cause physical discomfort and even sickness. Your graphics card failing to deliver a framerate as fast as the headset’s refresh rate can be incredibly frustrating.

To help combat this problem, in late 2016 Oculus introduced Asynchronous SpaceWarp (ASW) for the Rift. When you’re not meeting (or near) 90FPS in VR, ASW kicks in automatically. ASW forces the running game/app to render at 45FPS, then generates a synthetic frame in between each real from extrapolating from image and the headset tracking data for a total of 90FPS. Half the frames are “real” and half are “synthetic”. Whenever your graphics card has enough free resources to achieve 90FPS normally, ASW automatically disengages and you return to true 90FPS.

ASW is generally regarded as preferable to dropped frames, however, since it works by extrapolating based on the color and shapes in the frame, it can sometimes introduce distracting visual artifacts.

At the Connect 5 conference, Oculus introduced ASW 2.0. ASW 2.0 still uses the color and shape information of the frame, but now uses the depth information too (provided by the game/app). The new algorithm, powered by this depth information, should offer the same benefits of ASW 1.0 but now with fewer artifacts.

The caveat to ASW 2.0 however is that it requires the app to submit its depth feed, whereas ASW 1.0 worked without any developer support needed. In Unity, this can be done with a checkbox, and in Unreal Engine it is now enabled by default. For games which use custom engines, ASW 2.0 could require significant effort on the developer’s part.

If major developers support it, ASW 2.0 could be a huge benefit for Rift owners with lower-end PCs, and allow those with high-end PCs to play demanding games like simulators without the judder such games often exhibit.